


when the happiest memories are held hostage by the bitterest ones

by zarabithia



Category: Hawkeye (Comics)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, F/M, Halloween, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 10:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2577941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarabithia/pseuds/zarabithia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's Halloween, Kate is pregnant, and Clint decides to freak out in the middle of the candy aisle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when the happiest memories are held hostage by the bitterest ones

**Author's Note:**

> This fic features mentions of past child abuse and past homophobia.

Halloween is the first major holiday since Kate has been pregnant, and all she really wants to do is eat the entire candy section of the grocery store. In fact, this is really tempting and Kate stands there in the aisle with her nose pressed against the price tag of the Family Size bag of Reese Cups and lusts harder than she has ever lusted after anything in her life.

Kate has been expecting weird food cravings for the past six months, and they've never shown up. She still wants normal food. She just wants more of it. It’s like she’s feeding some sort of army instead of the tiny “still kind of looks a jelly bean with legs and a head” Bishop-Barton sprog inside of her.

It’s still big enough to fit in one of her hands. It shouldn't be taking up this much food. Maybe the doctors are all wrong and it’s a tapeworm instead.

Boy, everyone is really going to be disappointed if that’s the case.

"Do you need more food?" Barney asks doubtfully. "You just ate an entire pizza twenty minutes ago."

"It’s not my fault your brother has demonic sperm!" Kate snaps.

"I do not have demonic sperm!" Clint argues as he puts the Reese Cups into the cart.

"Anything that magically makes its way through the condom is demonic," Kate retorts.

It’s a little louder than Kate intends it to be, and at least three horrified adults in the candy aisle turn to look at her.

She glares at each of them with the kind of force that is appropriate for a former leader of the Young Avengers (she’s knocked up and therefore too old to be a Young Avenger these days and she’s not going to steal Steve’s position when all she wants to do is eat and sleep and have occasional bouts of marathon sex because hormones are funny.)

She can apparently still bring the A game as far as glares go, because they all leave the aisle immediately.

Beside her, Barney sighs. “Neither of you are alright in the head.”

"Why don’t you go get the milk?" Clint suggests.

"Why?" Barney asks.

"Because I don’t want to have to bail my pregnant girlfriend out of jail when she murders my brother."

Barney sighs at them, and Kate scowls at him as he leaves. She’s not really angry. It just feels good to scowl lately. She blames it on the hormones.

Okay, and she also blames it on the fact that she is about to have a baby whose only participating biological family will be a sometimes-supervillain uncle. The fact that Kate has no parent to share her happiness with also makes scowling feel good lately.

She rubs her stomach; Clint throws another bag of Reese Cups into the cart.

She expects that they will continue to have a conversation - about Barney, about the fact that Kate feels alternately horny and murderous these days without much of a middle ground (at least it’s not weepy, though; she will be thankful for that), or maybe about how they are going to weasel out of the upcoming Avengers Halloween party.

But for a moment, Clint is quiet enough that she wonders if he’s going to try for an apology for being mean to Barney.

She’s in the middle of dismissing the idea that Clint is that stupid when he says, “This time next year, the kid’s going to be old enough to go trick or treating.”

"Yeah," Kate says. "They’re not going to be old enough to eat candy, but old enough to dress up and wave hands while you and I take turns carrying them."

"…What do you think they’re going to want to be?" Clint asks.

"I think they’re only going to be nine months old, and won’t really have a whole lot of say. I vote they get dressed as a tapeworm until they are old enough to talk and can vote for Dracula or a werewolf or Captain America or the Scarlet Witch."

She expects a comment about how no child of theirs is going to dress up like Captain America, but she doesn’t get it.

"What did you dress up as?" Clint asks. His voice is soft and low, and Kate knows that she can’t drop hers to match his, because he isn’t looking at her and the tech is not that good.

She has no idea what this is about. This is Halloween, not Thanksgiving or Christmas. Yet this feels like the kind of emotional break-down that their little family has every Thanksgiving and Christmas, when it hits them right smack dab in the chest that their first families are fucked up.

That they were later given second families (their teams) and third families (each other) does not change the hurt of having lost their firsts.

But that’s for Thanksgiving, when being grateful is easy but brushing aside the phantom pain of what you could be grateful for isn’t. It’s for Christmas, when the happiest memories are held hostage by the bitterest ones.

It isn’t for Halloween, and never has been, and so Kate is confused.

It’s a weird first.

"I was a princess a lot, though if you tell America that, I will hide all your favorite trick arrows." She signs the words, since she can’t whisper them. "But after the age of seven, I was a Power Ranger forever. Until I started shooting bad guys for real instead of for pretend. Usually Kimberly, though a few times I mixed it up. Yellow Ranger one year, White Ranger one year, and Red Ranger one year because hey, there should be more ladies leading teams."

Kate has a momentary sadness about the fact that somewhere along the way, cello practice and archery practice got in the way of watching Power Rangers. Maybe she’ll utilize the joy that is Netflix to get caught up; it’s not like her feet are useful these days. Getting caught up and eating enough food to feed the entire population of Asgard or Asgardia or whatever they are calling themselves these days seems like a plan.

She also has a momentary thought about Cassie, and the fact that her favorite Ranger had been blue.

"You were a Power Ranger?" Clint looks up and grins, but it’s a goddamn Thanksgiving and Christmas smile.

Kate is too hungry and her feet are too close to hurting to deal with this growing level of frustration.

"Tell me what’s going on, Clint." She says it this time, because the sad and pathetic attempt at a smile has him looking at her.

"Most of the time, we didn’t have real costumes. Just painted our faces to look like ‘monsters,’ with some dirt or maybe’s Mom’s make-up. But when we were little … " he trails off and shrugs and Kate grasps both of his hands in hers; she squeezes tightly, willing him to finish.

"When we were little," he continues. "Mom thought it was important, and she wasn’t as … broken herself, you know. I was Cap one year, and Barney humored me by going as Bucky."

"If this is your way of telling me you want to sleep with Captain America, you have weird ass timing, Barton," she mock-scolds.

"Been there, done that," he snarks back, and the bite in his tone is a relief.

"Well, you do have impeccable taste in sexual partners. Nobody can ever argue that," Kate retorts. He looks surprised and Kate sighs at the foolishness. "There is no such think as heterosexual Hawkeyes, Clint. It’s a fact."

"If you say so, Hawkeye." Kate doesn’t have time to wonder where the hell Barney actually went to, and to worry if he became a supervillain on his way to finding the milk, before Clint says, "When I was six, I wanted to be Tinkerbell. She was angry, right, and allowed to be. I was … pretty angry too."

Kate thinks of her mom and her dad and Susan and the lies that she has known in her life. She thinks of the fact that she knew only peace and contentment when she was six years old, and the fact that Wendy had always been her favorite.

"Can’t imagine your dad was very happy about that," Kate says, and Clint looks away from her. He throws six more bags of candy into the cart, rather more forcefully than necessary.

Suddenly, standing there in the store, Kate feels an immense and overwhelming guilt about the skirt jokes she has made - all two of them. She winces internally and wishes that Clint had the ability to say “you are directly pressing upon one of my old scars,” because that would make much about their relationship far more sensible.

"No," Clint says. "Though, I guess he wasn’t too far off in his ‘fears’ about ‘fairies.’ I did grow up to fuck boys."

"You grew up to fuck Captain America, who would gladly punch your bigoted father in the face," Kate points out. "Instead, he’s just going to have to settle for being grandpa to our kid, because both bio grandpas are assholes."

"And one of them’s dead."

"Not the point."

He shakes his head. “In our line of work, let’s just hope he stays dead.”

"If he comes back, I will kill him. The jury will let me off, because hormones. And also because I will have fabulous representation in the form of either She-Hulk or your ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend." Bernie Rosenthal had represented Bucky Barnes during his treason trial, and Kate was sure that she could do a decent job defending Kate in a trial for murdering a no-longer dead father-in-law. 

"As long as you aren’t going to rely on Matt Murdock." He throws a bag of bite-sized snickers into the cart and Kate corrects this flaw by throwing a bag of bite-sized Kit-Kats into the cart instead. "Let’s go find Barney and see what kind of trouble he got into on his way to get the milk."

"In a minute." She lays a hand on his arm and turns back to look at her, which is good, but she signs what she is about to say anyway. Just so there’s no confusion, and he can’t pretend that he wasn’t reading her lips. "Next year, for Halloween: you wear my costume, I’ll wear yours and the kid wears Tinkerbell. And we punch anyone who has anything bad to say square in the face, thereby teaching baby Bishop-Barton their first lesson in how to deal with assholes."

"I don’t think that’s going to be their first lesson," Clint points out. "You gonna wear a skirt?"

"Unless you want to," Kate says with a shrug. "Though maybe we both will. Maybe I’ll put you in one when we get home and I can take it off of you later when I’ve finished eating this entire fucking cart of chocolate."

Clint looks startled, like this is the first time anyone’s ever suggested such a thing. Maybe it is. Maybe that’s because this is the first pregnancy that’s made it month six, and therefore the first time that Clint is having a mini freakout about future Bishop-Barton’s costuming adventures.

Maybe Kate’s head is starting to hurt as much as her feet.

"I liked your first costume. With the scarf," Clint says.

"It will be a good look on you," Kate answers.

Clint glances from her hands to her face, probably to see if she’s being sincere. Satisfied with what he sees, he smiles - a real Clint Barton smile not a Thanksgiving or Christmas one - and asks, “Shall we go rescue my brother from the dairy department now?”

"Well, we are superheroes," Kate says. "What else would we do?"

Kate waddles a bit on the way there, but Clint’s pushing a full cart so his pace matches hers pretty well. But then, it’s not the first time she could say that.


End file.
